The collapse of honey bee colonies – mostly maintained by bee-keepers – has been well documented over the past few years. Now scientists are seeing a decline in other bee communities. UMASS Amherst researchers will use a $3.3 million grant from the USDA to study wild – or native – bees over five years. The hundreds of varieties of native bees in this part of the country are primary crop pollinators and critical to agriculture. UMASS Amherst's Anne Averill, the study's lead researcher, says scientists are not sure what's causing local extinction but they're determined to find out the cause.
"We have a three pronged approach. We're going to assess [bee] communities in MA, CT, ME, and NY, working with farmers of wild blueberries, cranberry, squash, pumpkin, and apple. Once those assessments are done, then we'll look at what factors are threatening the health of the bee communities."
Averill says UMASS researchers working with other universities in the Northeast hope to identify the cause of the decline by looking at bee habitat, pesticide use, disease, parasites, or an interaction between these factors. Averill says as far as researchers can tell, climate change is not a factor in the native bee decline. She adds, it's not just farmers who can protect native bees, consumers can; when buying flowering plants, she says pick the ones the bees are already on – they're likely native and better sources of pollen and nectar.